Graham's blog entry Friday 21 December 2007

Published on Fri 21st Dec 2007

My week started in Langport, where I hosted a meeting of the Party's professional campaign staff in South West England. We met in "the warehouse" an industrial building converted into an environmentally sustainable (ie. minimal eco footprint) community facility to discuss staff support arrangements for the 2009 european elections.

Meanwhile in Brussels the 27 agriculture ministers were discussing reform of the laws governing wine production, where it looks as if farm commissioner Mariann Fischer-Boel might just secure agreement to far reaching reform plans which will save the taxpayer a lot of money: and the 27 fisheries ministers were blockaded by Greenpeace protesters calling for the closure of all fisheries until fish stocks are restored. They agreed a recovery plan for bluefin tuna and cuts in some quotas for other fish, but these will mainly slow down the decline in fish stocks rather than reverse them.

News emerged on Monday of an announcement made late last Friday to give two million euros in aid for medical treatment of the victims of HIV-Aids in Benghazi, Libya. This was evidently the cost of securing the release earlier this year of the Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor held hostage there.

In Brussels on Tuesday I met my colleagues Chris Davies and Lena Ek, just back from the climate conference in Bali. When quizzed at a press conference there it emerged that they were the only two of the18 MEPs present to have offset the carbon emissions of their travel. As ever, others talk the talk but it is LibDems who walk the walk. I was proud of them. The conference failed to secure a commitment by all industrialised countries to cut their carbon emissions by 25-40% (compared to 1990 figures) by 2020, but all agreed to 'major reductions in global emissions'. As with fish, we may still be heading for catastrophe, but perhaps not quite as rapidly as before.

On Tuesday afternoon the Portuguese Prime Minister came to Parliament to report on his country's six month stint chairing the Council of Ministers. He was too hubristic - it has been a good Presidency but not a superb one - and I told him so. For my speech, see www.europarl.europa.eu. The best part of the Presidency was getting all member states to agree reforms to make the EU work better, even if one Prime Minister could not be bothered to turn up on time for the signing ceremony.

I travelled with the leaders of the other political groups on Wednesday to Ljubljana, capital of Slovenia, to meet the prime minister and his cabinet. Slovenia, the only part of the former Yugoslavia yet to join the EU, takes over the Presidency of the Council from Portugal on 1 January. They appear to be fairly well prepared. But over the grilled pike at the castle Brdo their finance minister told me he is worried there will be a financial crisis in the Spring which could overwhelm the EU. Gordon Brown is clearly worried too: he has invited Merkel and Sarkozy to a crisis planning meeting in London on 10 January. They will almost certainly discuss the Italian finance minister's idea of a single EU bank supervisory authority, though the UK opposes such a move (which is why Brown wants to see the French and Germans without the other EU members present).

The Slovenes are also worried about Kosovo. Serbia has called the EU's decision to send a police and rule of law mission there 'illegal' and said that recognising an independent Kosovo would be 'the most dangerous precedent since the end of WW2'.

The Slovenian government kindly provided a car to take me to Venice on Thursday evening, but my flight from there to Bristol was two hours delayed and I did not arrive home until nearly two o'clock this morning. Thankfully my day of constituency business is not too heavy.

Parliament will not sit again until January 7, so I'll write again at the end of that week. I wish you a restful Christmas meantime.